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Lewisburg chronicle, and the West Branch farmer. September 5, 1849, Image 1

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Lewisburg Chronicle, and the West Branch Farmer, Lewisburg Chronicle, and West Branch Farmer and Lewisburg Chronicle

East central Pennsylvania's Union County is dominated to the north and west by the Allegheny Mountains, with farming and settlement in the south and east. Founded in 1784, the county seat of Lewisburg is located on the West Bank of the Susquehanna River, Union Countyâ€™s eastern boundary.

At least eight early Lewisburg weeklies came and went between 1824 and 1842. "W.B. Shriner & S.A. Burkenbine started the Lewisburg Chronicle September 23, 1843," according to the 1857 history Otzinachson, by John Meginness. "March 16, 1844, Mr. Burkenbine retired discouraged. Mr. Shriner plucked up courage and continued the paper . . . till . . . 1847, when he sold out to Oliver N. Worden, who conducted it until January 1st, 1850, when Henry C. Hickock became principal editor . . ."

The three Lewisburg Chronicles of the period 1849-59 were broadly similar in layout, as well as in outlook, within their four-page format. The front page was devoted to morally instructive prose, travel writing on exotic climes from Switzerland to the Sandwich Islands, and uplifting poetry; page 2 chiefly reprinted local, state, and national political news, speeches, and occasional items of foreign news; page 3 was given over to advertising (typically including the only illustrations); and page 4 was a catch-all, combining humorous stories, letters, and court news along with advertisements, many of which hawked patent medicine and nostrums. For years, readers of page 4 endured the dour weekly glare of "Old Dr. Jacob Townsend, the original discoverer of the Genuine Townsend Sarsaparilla," which vied for attention with such suspect cure-alls as "Trask's Magnetic Ointment" and "Thomson's Compound Syrup of Wood Tar and Naphtha."

Published in 1849, the Lewisburg Chronicle, and the West Branch Farmer often made mention of the California gold rush, much of it in the form of cautionary advice to local readers afflicted with "the gold bug." The Lewisburg Chronicle, and West Branch Farmer that succeeded it on January 2, 1850, with Hickock as editor, boasted in its bold subhead that it was to be "An independent family Paper --- devoted to News, Literature, Politics, Agriculture, Science and Morality." All three papers featured infrequent but often extensive ruminations on the emerging great issue of the age--slavery in America, and its extension to new states joining the union--although it would be the mid-1850s before the paper formally identified itself as following a Republican banner.